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Type: Very Small Governmental

Posted by
6thtimeatbat
on 2012-09-11

PUBLIC:

Pitched them because we had heard good things about them from the likes of Fred Wilson but ultimately came out unimpressed.

While they did ask a fair amount of questions about the technology we were developing, their insistence on longer traction made them act as if they were running a Series A fund instead of a seed stage one. Our CTO gave them a full run-down of the guts of our technology and we showed them how our first three customers were using it. Yet that didn't seem like enough

Posted by
highlander
on 2010-11-10

PUBLIC:

I've held my breath on this one for a while, but we wasted an incredible amount of time with NYC Seed. They are much celebrated by the NY political and funding communities (eg. by Fred Wilson, who I respect very much), but the low friction, fast up / down process that is promised was anything but fast or low friction. In fact, we very nearly lost our opportunity to raise good money *because* of NYC Seed. If you value your time, do not spend it here. They are a firing squad.

I sincerely hope the city produces a better plan to help startups. How about we start with some tax relief?

NYC Seed says on their site they put in the first $200k with the "goal of launching an initial product". I met Owen Davis once, and he made it sound like they have a standard set of terms like Y Combinator. But in this case, the company Path 101 already raised $350k from a bunch of well known angels including Fred Wilson (http://path101.com/investors) well before NYC Seed put the money in. What consumer tech product can't be launched for $350k in today's market that can be launched for $550k?

Seemed like a bit of a conflict that Fred Wilson was a personal investor in Path 101's first round of angel capital, and NYC Seed (which Fred Wilson is on the board of http://www.nycseed.com/advisoryBoard....) bridged them after the angel money ran out without the angels reupping. Was city/university money (http://www.nycseed.com/about.html) used to protect the investment of prominent NYC angels?

I'm sure funds deviate from their investment charter all the time, but I don't know how I'd feel about this if I were a NYC tax payer. It would be good to know how much money one can raise and still get a bridge from NYC Seed. $500k? $1mm?

Aside from all that, would love to hear if people think it's worth applying to NYC Seed if you don't have one of its board members already invested in your company.